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Knowledge of leptin changes this because what you eat does actually matter. The goal should be intermittent fasting, where you eat little-to-no carbs about five

Knowledge of leptin changes this because what you eat does actually matter. The goal should be intermittent fasting, where you eat little-to-no carbs about five consecutive days/week and then plenty of carbs two consecutive days/week. This approach ensures leptin levels in the obese body remain high enough to prevent onset of starvation mode while minimizing glucose levels to promote catabolic action on body fat [1]. The bottom line is: you're welcome to eat your Big Mac and beers, just only two days out of the week. Also, stress has an important role to play on weight loss. Stress causes your adrenal glands to release cortisol. Cortisol increases glucose levels through gluconeogenesis by making glucose from non-carbohydrate sources, such as proteins from muscles. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catabolism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catabolism

ninkendo 3y ago
It sounds like any other of these diets that tell you when and how to eat but not how much. I’m pretty sure I could gain weight when doing everything you describe, if I eat really terribly during the days I eat “plenty of carbs”. The key to CICO is that you’re actually measuring not just the calories you eat, but the weight you gain/lose, and are continually calibrating. If my diet jacks up my leptin levels such that I don’t lose weight, that will show up on the scale, and I have to adjust my calories down to compensate. With this system I am guaranteed to lose weight so long as I don’t cheat. This is trivially true: the calibration could technically push you all the way to zero calories per day (which will never happen in practice, obviously.) Case in point, I lost 50 lbs with this approach, eating McDonald’s nearly every single day. I kept it off for roughly 8 years. (I since became a dad and have let myself go tremendously, gaining ~30lbs back, but I will cross that bridge soon.)
- waterheater 3y ago
  >If my diet jacks up my leptin levels such that I don’t lose weight, that will show up on the scale, and I have to adjust my calories down to compensate. >With this system I am guaranteed to lose weight so long as I don’t cheat. Unfortunately, that's just not true. Here's some great quotes from the book "The Obesity Code" (which I've just recently found and find an excellent book): >The abrupt increase in obesity began exactly with the officially sanctioned move toward a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. >A 30 percent reduction in caloric intake results in a 30 percent decrease in caloric expenditure. >Total energy expenditure is the sum of basal metabolic rate, thermogenic effect of food, nonexercise activity thermogenesis, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption and exercise. >Since hormones control both Calories In and Calories Out, obesity is a hormonal, not a caloric, disorder. >If hormones regulate fat growth, then obesity is a hormonal, not a caloric disorder. >Sugar will increase the blood glucose level and provoke an insulin response from the pancreas. Olive oil will not...[cause] significant increase in blood glucose or insulin. The two different foods evoke vastly different metabolic and hormonal responses." All of this is to say that it's not enough to simply adjust calories. Yes, calories matter to a point, and everyone knows that starvation (e.g., 0 calories for an extended period of time) is effective in the long-term, but starvation will also harm your body, and no reasonably-minded person can suggest it as a viable approach to weight loss. The best available scientific evidence shows that continuing to decrease caloric intake can make weight loss more difficult for an obese person.
  - ninkendo 3y ago
    whoosh That was the sound of you zooming right past my argument and pretending I was saying something I wasn’t. I’m not saying CICO is a good idea. I’m not saying it’s healthy. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying it will have a high chance of success vis a vis people actually being able to stick with it. I’m merely saying IF you do it right, THEN you will lose weight. This is trivially and tautologically true (to the point of CICO being useless to most people!), but it’s extremely tiring having to explain it over and over that it still works despite all of this. To put it another way: there are two operative definitions of “works” for a diet: 1. Will it work if you do it exactly as directed? 2. Is a typical dieter likely to have success by attempting this diet? CICO fails miserably at 2. It passes with flying colors at 1. Its best not to conflate the two definitions in the middle of an argument because you end up talking right past one another.
    - MostlyStable 3y ago
      This is something I've said repeatedly in other places and this is a certain segment of people who can't understand it. CICO is, especially at the population level, terrible dieting advice. We have decades of experience and oodles of research showing that, as advice it does not work. However, it is, as you point out, basically tautologically true/correct. For CICO to _not_ be correct would essentially be breaking physics and generating mass/energy from nothing. Yes, your body can change it's energy expenditure in response to dieting, but this is accounted for in the CO part of CICO. If you consume fewer calories than your body expends (in all the myriad of ways that your body can/does expend calories), then you _must_ lose weight. The fact that CICO is true does not make it good advice but the fact that it's bad advice doesn't make it false.
      - lliamander 3y ago
        I think of it this way: CICO is an axiom we have to assume in order to figure out why a diet isn't working. E.g. if your input is 1200 calories and you work out, but you aren't losing weight? Maybe your NEAT is way down (or you have a thyroid issue). You are super active but can't lose weight? Maybe you aren't tracking food calories accurately, or you need to eat more satiating foods. CICO isn't a strategy, it's part of the landscape and your diet is a strategy to navigate that landscape. But no matter what your particular strategy, it is always going to involve eating less hyper-pallitable foods and getting more activity. That may not be all, but you cannot go from obesity to a healthy weight without those things.
voisin 3y ago
You focus on carbs specifically, but IF is about all calories being eliminated for periods, and it doesn’t necessarily mean you eat plenty on the break days (if you take break days at all - some people exist on 16:8 or 20:4 or whatever perpetually). I think you have something important here but the wording is ambiguous and I am wondering if you can clarify your thinking? Are you saying only carbs matter with respect to leptin?
- waterheater 3y ago
  Thanks for asking. I'll first explain the process (because I want to highlight why IF matters), and then I'll answer your question directly. It's going to take a little bit to properly elaborate, but I believe it's worth your time to read. We first need to choose which of the following macronutrients contribute most to weight gain: protein, fat, or carbohydrates. Proteins (or, rather, amino acids) are not known for contributing to body fat in any significant manner. Fat was once thought to be the main contributor when calories--not carbohydrates--became accepted as fattening. However, modern science shows fat has little significant contribution to body fat and that the real contributor to body fat are carbohydrates. The discovery of leptin about 30 years ago finally shows why. Carbs are sugars. Sugars, such as glucose, are the main source of fuel in the body, as they are eventually synthesized into ATP. Blood glucose levels are regulated by the hormone insulin. Elevated blood glucose levels increases insulin production, whereas low blood glucose decreases insulin production (with glucagon helping stabilize blood glucose levels). High insulin levels promotes anabolism, whereas low insulin levels promotes catabolism. Creating body fat is an anabolic process, whereas burning body fat is a catabolic process. Putting it all together, eating carbs inhibits the essential catabolic processes for burning fat. While entirely cutting out carbs should be the answer, it's not. Many obese people report failure to lose weight on ketogenic diets. Why? The hormone leptin. See, leptin levels increase with insulin levels. Leptin signals the availability of energy reserves in the body. Adipose tissue (that is, body fat) is the primary producer of leptin. Importantly, leptin levels vary exponentially with body fat. The obese individual's body is so oversaturated with leptin, the body becomes resistant to leptin. Decreased leptin levels will cause body fat to be burned. On a ketogenic diet, catabolic processes initially cause a reduction in body fat, which then decreases leptin production. Because the obese body has leptin resistance, the leptin production decrease is interpreted by the brain as a severe drop in available energy reserves, causing total energy expenditure to be immediately reduced and placing the body in "starvation mode." At this point, eliminating body fat actually becomes more difficult, as excess carbs become anabolized into body fat due to decreased energy expenditures. So, to finally get to your question, how do carbs matter with respect to leptin? To lose weight over months and years, an obese person needs to eat carbs to (1) keep their leptin levels stable over the course of each week to prevent the body from entering starvation mode while (2) maximizing the efficacy of catabolic processes. As the body gradually recovers from its leptin resistance (which will likely take time), the body will shed fat without triggering the energy-minimization mode. In this paradigm, your total energy expenditure determines how fast fat will be burned. According to the book "The Obesity Code", "total energy expenditure is the sum of basal metabolic rate, thermogenic effect of food, nonexercise activity thermogenesis, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption [(EPOC),] and exercise". Of these five factors, EPOC is mostly likely underutilized. A simple 10-minute HIIT routine every other day will regularly drive EPOC, which causes ATP synthesis. When an person isn't eating carbs, the body dips into fat stores to acquire the necessary glucose for ATP synthesis. Note that with this approach, exercise isn't strictly necessary but becomes extremely beneficial to maximize the efficacy of catabolic processes. Intermittent fasting should work as long as the specific protocol doesn't decrease leptin levels such that the obese body enters starvation mode. In my opinion, the most workable approach for people is to try their best to completely eliminate carbs Monday-Friday, eat all the carbs they want on the weekends, and do the bare minimum of a 10-minutes HIIT routine every other day.
com2kid 3y ago
> Knowledge of leptin changes this because what you eat does actually matter. The goal should be intermittent fasting, where you eat little-to-no carbs about five consecutive days/week and then plenty of carbs two consecutive days/week. This approach ensures leptin levels in the obese body remain high enough to prevent onset of starvation mode while minimizing glucose levels to promote catabolic action on body fat [1]. I hate to post the same video in the same thread twice, but this video dives into carb cycling, and explains that actually it is calorie cycling that makes the difference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwZfryrVddY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwZfryrVddY FWIW, and I'm a big keto proponent, the goal should be whatever works. Keto is super effective for some people, and completely useless for others. Research has started to figure out why some people respond to keto better than others, but low carb fails really hard for a certain % of the population, works obscenely well for another % of the population, and works as well as any other dieting system for the majority of the population. As someone for whom keto works really well (I was on keto for 5 years, training 12hrs+ a week in the gym!), I totally spent time promoting low carb to everyone, until I tried to help some people for whom it just didn't work at all.

ninkendo 3y ago

It sounds like any other of these diets that tell you when and how to eat but not how much. I’m pretty sure I could gain weight when doing everything you describe, if I eat really terribly during the days I eat “plenty of carbs”. The key to CICO is that you’re actually measuring not just the calories you eat, but the weight you gain/lose, and are continually calibrating. If my diet jacks up my leptin levels such that I don’t lose weight, that will show up on the scale, and I have to adjust my calories down to compensate. With this system I am guaranteed to lose weight so long as I don’t cheat. This is trivially true: the calibration could technically push you all the way to zero calories per day (which will never happen in practice, obviously.) Case in point, I lost 50 lbs with this approach, eating McDonald’s nearly every single day. I kept it off for roughly 8 years. (I since became a dad and have let myself go tremendously, gaining ~30lbs back, but I will cross that bridge soon.)

waterheater 3y ago
>If my diet jacks up my leptin levels such that I don’t lose weight, that will show up on the scale, and I have to adjust my calories down to compensate. >With this system I am guaranteed to lose weight so long as I don’t cheat. Unfortunately, that's just not true. Here's some great quotes from the book "The Obesity Code" (which I've just recently found and find an excellent book): >The abrupt increase in obesity began exactly with the officially sanctioned move toward a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. >A 30 percent reduction in caloric intake results in a 30 percent decrease in caloric expenditure. >Total energy expenditure is the sum of basal metabolic rate, thermogenic effect of food, nonexercise activity thermogenesis, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption and exercise. >Since hormones control both Calories In and Calories Out, obesity is a hormonal, not a caloric, disorder. >If hormones regulate fat growth, then obesity is a hormonal, not a caloric disorder. >Sugar will increase the blood glucose level and provoke an insulin response from the pancreas. Olive oil will not...[cause] significant increase in blood glucose or insulin. The two different foods evoke vastly different metabolic and hormonal responses." All of this is to say that it's not enough to simply adjust calories. Yes, calories matter to a point, and everyone knows that starvation (e.g., 0 calories for an extended period of time) is effective in the long-term, but starvation will also harm your body, and no reasonably-minded person can suggest it as a viable approach to weight loss. The best available scientific evidence shows that continuing to decrease caloric intake can make weight loss more difficult for an obese person.
- ninkendo 3y ago
  whoosh That was the sound of you zooming right past my argument and pretending I was saying something I wasn’t. I’m not saying CICO is a good idea. I’m not saying it’s healthy. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying it will have a high chance of success vis a vis people actually being able to stick with it. I’m merely saying IF you do it right, THEN you will lose weight. This is trivially and tautologically true (to the point of CICO being useless to most people!), but it’s extremely tiring having to explain it over and over that it still works despite all of this. To put it another way: there are two operative definitions of “works” for a diet: 1. Will it work if you do it exactly as directed? 2. Is a typical dieter likely to have success by attempting this diet? CICO fails miserably at 2. It passes with flying colors at 1. Its best not to conflate the two definitions in the middle of an argument because you end up talking right past one another.
  - MostlyStable 3y ago
    This is something I've said repeatedly in other places and this is a certain segment of people who can't understand it. CICO is, especially at the population level, terrible dieting advice. We have decades of experience and oodles of research showing that, as advice it does not work. However, it is, as you point out, basically tautologically true/correct. For CICO to _not_ be correct would essentially be breaking physics and generating mass/energy from nothing. Yes, your body can change it's energy expenditure in response to dieting, but this is accounted for in the CO part of CICO. If you consume fewer calories than your body expends (in all the myriad of ways that your body can/does expend calories), then you _must_ lose weight. The fact that CICO is true does not make it good advice but the fact that it's bad advice doesn't make it false.
    - lliamander 3y ago
      I think of it this way: CICO is an axiom we have to assume in order to figure out why a diet isn't working. E.g. if your input is 1200 calories and you work out, but you aren't losing weight? Maybe your NEAT is way down (or you have a thyroid issue). You are super active but can't lose weight? Maybe you aren't tracking food calories accurately, or you need to eat more satiating foods. CICO isn't a strategy, it's part of the landscape and your diet is a strategy to navigate that landscape. But no matter what your particular strategy, it is always going to involve eating less hyper-pallitable foods and getting more activity. That may not be all, but you cannot go from obesity to a healthy weight without those things.

voisin 3y ago

You focus on carbs specifically, but IF is about all calories being eliminated for periods, and it doesn’t necessarily mean you eat plenty on the break days (if you take break days at all - some people exist on 16:8 or 20:4 or whatever perpetually). I think you have something important here but the wording is ambiguous and I am wondering if you can clarify your thinking? Are you saying only carbs matter with respect to leptin?

waterheater 3y ago
Thanks for asking. I'll first explain the process (because I want to highlight why IF matters), and then I'll answer your question directly. It's going to take a little bit to properly elaborate, but I believe it's worth your time to read. We first need to choose which of the following macronutrients contribute most to weight gain: protein, fat, or carbohydrates. Proteins (or, rather, amino acids) are not known for contributing to body fat in any significant manner. Fat was once thought to be the main contributor when calories--not carbohydrates--became accepted as fattening. However, modern science shows fat has little significant contribution to body fat and that the real contributor to body fat are carbohydrates. The discovery of leptin about 30 years ago finally shows why. Carbs are sugars. Sugars, such as glucose, are the main source of fuel in the body, as they are eventually synthesized into ATP. Blood glucose levels are regulated by the hormone insulin. Elevated blood glucose levels increases insulin production, whereas low blood glucose decreases insulin production (with glucagon helping stabilize blood glucose levels). High insulin levels promotes anabolism, whereas low insulin levels promotes catabolism. Creating body fat is an anabolic process, whereas burning body fat is a catabolic process. Putting it all together, eating carbs inhibits the essential catabolic processes for burning fat. While entirely cutting out carbs should be the answer, it's not. Many obese people report failure to lose weight on ketogenic diets. Why? The hormone leptin. See, leptin levels increase with insulin levels. Leptin signals the availability of energy reserves in the body. Adipose tissue (that is, body fat) is the primary producer of leptin. Importantly, leptin levels vary exponentially with body fat. The obese individual's body is so oversaturated with leptin, the body becomes resistant to leptin. Decreased leptin levels will cause body fat to be burned. On a ketogenic diet, catabolic processes initially cause a reduction in body fat, which then decreases leptin production. Because the obese body has leptin resistance, the leptin production decrease is interpreted by the brain as a severe drop in available energy reserves, causing total energy expenditure to be immediately reduced and placing the body in "starvation mode." At this point, eliminating body fat actually becomes more difficult, as excess carbs become anabolized into body fat due to decreased energy expenditures. So, to finally get to your question, how do carbs matter with respect to leptin? To lose weight over months and years, an obese person needs to eat carbs to (1) keep their leptin levels stable over the course of each week to prevent the body from entering starvation mode while (2) maximizing the efficacy of catabolic processes. As the body gradually recovers from its leptin resistance (which will likely take time), the body will shed fat without triggering the energy-minimization mode. In this paradigm, your total energy expenditure determines how fast fat will be burned. According to the book "The Obesity Code", "total energy expenditure is the sum of basal metabolic rate, thermogenic effect of food, nonexercise activity thermogenesis, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption [(EPOC),] and exercise". Of these five factors, EPOC is mostly likely underutilized. A simple 10-minute HIIT routine every other day will regularly drive EPOC, which causes ATP synthesis. When an person isn't eating carbs, the body dips into fat stores to acquire the necessary glucose for ATP synthesis. Note that with this approach, exercise isn't strictly necessary but becomes extremely beneficial to maximize the efficacy of catabolic processes. Intermittent fasting should work as long as the specific protocol doesn't decrease leptin levels such that the obese body enters starvation mode. In my opinion, the most workable approach for people is to try their best to completely eliminate carbs Monday-Friday, eat all the carbs they want on the weekends, and do the bare minimum of a 10-minutes HIIT routine every other day.

com2kid 3y ago

> Knowledge of leptin changes this because what you eat does actually matter. The goal should be intermittent fasting, where you eat little-to-no carbs about five consecutive days/week and then plenty of carbs two consecutive days/week. This approach ensures leptin levels in the obese body remain high enough to prevent onset of starvation mode while minimizing glucose levels to promote catabolic action on body fat [1]. I hate to post the same video in the same thread twice, but this video dives into carb cycling, and explains that actually it is calorie cycling that makes the difference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwZfryrVddY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwZfryrVddY FWIW, and I'm a big keto proponent, the goal should be whatever works. Keto is super effective for some people, and completely useless for others. Research has started to figure out why some people respond to keto better than others, but low carb fails really hard for a certain % of the population, works obscenely well for another % of the population, and works as well as any other dieting system for the majority of the population. As someone for whom keto works really well (I was on keto for 5 years, training 12hrs+ a week in the gym!), I totally spent time promoting low carb to everyone, until I tried to help some people for whom it just didn't work at all.